In their words: Matthew Margini

Can you take us through your day on 9/11, and your initial reaction to the attacks?

It was the first day of seventh grade. And I remember, my school library had a bunch of desktop computers and a bunch of bean bag chairs where kids would sit with their laptops. A kid was on one of the computers, and he just yelled out, “Someone bombed the World Trade Center.” And we were like, “What, what?” So we all went to see what he was looking at. . . . Shortly after that, we were called into the auditorium and told that our parents were here to pick us up because America was under attack. More specifically, the World Trade Center was under attack. Then I met up with my dad and we walked across Central Park, and we saw the smoke. It was really striking — it was really disturbing. But what was even more disturbing was the smell, which I think anyone who was there is going to talk about; I mean that sort of melted plastic/rubber/metal smell lingered in the air and even reached our apartment all the way up on like 96th Street for days.

Also, I was separated from my mom that night because she was a therapist working in Brooklyn, like South Brooklyn, and they closed the bridges. They sealed off Manhattan so she couldn't come back, and I think what she did was she ended up sleeping over at one of her patient’s houses in Brooklyn. And at like 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning, the next day, she managed to find one cab driver who was willing to drive her into the city and she finally reunited with us. But that night was incredibly scary, because I was separated. I didn't know what was going to happen. My dad just had the news blaring 24/7, and it was just as chaotic as you know, we all felt.

As a therapist, did your mom deal with a lot of 9/11 cases in the aftermath?

Oh for years. For years she did. I think she even saw some first responders. I don’t know, I'd have to check with her to see if that's true. But, you know, she dealt with a lot of post-traumatic cases of people after 9/11 for years and years. It really kind of left an imprint on my relationship with her for the next few years because she was so scared of being separated from me that she would bring me to work every Saturday. So I would go with her to her office in Brooklyn and we would actually drive — I forgot what the road is, that had a really, really panoramic view of downtown Manhattan in Brooklyn — but anyway we would see the two beams of light on our way back every Saturday and so that's pretty seared into my memory, seeing that every Saturday. [Dr. Margini is referring to a temporary art installation in 2002 that involved two powerful beams of light, reaching up into the sky, evoking the towers that were destroyed.]

What was your initial reaction? Because we've been reading a lot of material from adults who were in the city on that day, but we haven't really heard from anyone who was a kid at the time. So when someone in your school was like, “Someone bombed the World Trade Center,” what was going through your head?

Good question. Confusion. One thing that's interesting is that I think we, as New York kids, as New York City private school kids — because I was at a private school called Trevor Day, I don't know if you guys know about it — I think by and large, we felt worldlier and more mature than other kids in our age group. You know it's kind of a stereotype of New York kids, but I think it's fairly true. And I was the same way. I think that a lot of us were emotionally immature, but we felt ourselves to be more up on current events and politics and stuff like that even... even in middle school, you know. And so, I remember the kid who was sitting at that computer — I think it was a kid named Henry Moskowitz. I remember him sounding pretty authoritative, and in-the-know about what was going on. And there were other kids who were trying to sound authoritative, but we didn't know what was going on. And we certainly didn't know that planes had hit the buildings yet. All we thought was that it was a bomb. So there was confusion, but there was also posturing, I would say, in my class group, and that was weird. And it just... it just kind of lent more confusion to the situation.

So, you know, I’m trying to think how I felt. I guess I was scared. But I also just didn't know enough to really understand the gravity of the situation. I wasn't a little kid, but I didn't think it was going to happen again. I didn't think that lightning could strike twice in the same place. And so I wasn't overwhelmed with fear. I was just kind of consumed with anxiety about the immediate situation of being separated from my mom. But I didn't feel like America was about to get attacked again, if that makes sense.

So you were with your father that night. I’m curious, did your father tell you anything about the attacks, about what they meant, or your mother when she got back? I’m just wondering how a parent would have addressed their children, or talked to their children about this.

You know, what’s interesting is that I remember that in history class, later on that fall, we would have discussions about 9/11. And I said something in class that really got my teacher’s attention. I said something to the effect of... I made an analogy to like cookies or something and I said that like, basically this atrocity had been done to us because we had better cookies than they did. And they were resentful, which seems to me in retrospect to be a gross oversimplification and kind of a low-key racist assumption about what was going on. You know, it's basically what Bush said: "They hate us for our freedom." It was a version of that line. And I said it in class, and the teacher thought it was so profound that she then celebrated it and even quoted my cookie analogy in her farewell address when she retired later that year, which was bizarre to me.

But the idea that the fundamentalist Muslim East resented the open liberal West for an abundance of resources that we had and that comparative scarcity of resources that they had — that was basically what I said in class — I have a feeling that my dad gave that gave me that idea. I have a feeling that... because he was a philosopher figure. He was a kind of anthropologist figure. He was... Actually there's a portrait of him right behind me. He looked like Sigmund Freud. And he would sort of sit in his armchair with his legs crossed and explain the world. And he was actually pretty Marxist in his thinking, like he was a communist in Argentina in the 70s, and he had to escape because they were disappearing people. But I think that even at this time, he probably absorbed a little bit of the jingoism and the nationalistic sentiment that was in the air right after 9/11, and I think I absorbed it too, the idea that we're a better society, a better culture, and that the only possible reason they could have attacked us was because they resent us. So, yeah, there was a lot of rhetoric flying around, there was a lot of ideology flying around, and I think it stuck to me too.

And so for the rest of the year, I mean, you mentioned how your teacher — what you said in class — it resonated with her. Was 9/11 a major topic in class throughout the year?

It was.

Were you guys reading up on articles the whole time?

Only in social studies. We didn't talk about it in class but in social studies... What was her name? I think her name was Miss Kaplan or something. She really wanted it to become a contemporary social and political issues class. And we often talked about 9/11 and what it meant, and what we thought the root cause of it was. And of course, the discourse was pretty simplified because it was seventh grade, but we had some real talk in there. I remember people cried — it was real stuff.

And so when did you feel that people kind of — I don't want to say got over it — but when did things kind of go back to normal?

Yeah, well, after that year, I mean, in eighth grade, we didn’t talk about 9/11 at all. You know, it was only a year later. And the only reason it remained imprinted on my mind is because I would go with my mom to her office every Saturday and see the two lights. The lights really reminded everybody of what had happened. And of course, I mean, that area was still pretty chaotic for a long time.

[We followed up with Dr. Margini about this memory, as it turns out the art exhibit to which he is referring, Tribute in Light, was only active in March & April 2002. It was then repeated every year on the anniversary of 9/11. He noted that for him, the memory must have been so powerful it remained as a constant symbol and reminder.]

What do you remember most from that time? Like what stuck out to you the most, was it the lights that you saw, if you could pinpoint one thing?

The smell. The lights are, of course, the aftermath. But the smell was by far the most indelible part of the whole thing. Because I mean smell is intimately connected to the hippocampus and to memory in general, and I think some of our most powerful memories have a smell attached to them. So it's kind of natural that that would be the case, but it really was the weirdest thing about the whole experience. The fact that you could go to bed on 96th Street, and be somewhere completely distant from lower Manhattan and smell burning plastic for days and weeks after it happened. I mean, that was crazy.

Did your school have a break, and when?

Yeah. So 9/11 was a Tuesday, right? That Wednesday, we didn't go to school. We came back on Thursday.

One day?

Yeah. I think we probably had an assembly, I would imagine. I have no idea what happened in that assembly. Like I didn't register it.

So now a little bit about the aftermath. You mentioned President Bush's attack on our freedom, that speech, and only paying attention to that. What did you think of going to war after 9/11?

I mean, you know, insofar as I had any coherent political thoughts at that time — apparently I did because I was praised for the cookie analogy — I thought it was justified. I thought the Afghanistan war was justified; however I think my dad did too and honestly I took my political cues from my dad. However, you know, two years later, when it was the run up to the Iraq War, that's when my dad's true feelings about that Bush guy started coming out, and he talked about how Bush was just a caveman warmonger who was just stoking the blood lust of the rubes and how he was going to get reelected just because people like a man with blood on on his hands. He had a lot of really charged rhetoric that I completely agreed with at the time. Also, I wasn't really in a position to disagree. But I agree with him in retrospect, to be honest, and the Iraq War was to us pretty self-evidently unjustified. But the Afghanistan war was just right at that time.

And so before 9/11, did you know about any of the possible terrorist attacks that could occur? Like did you know about bin Laden and Al Qaeda before?

No. I mean, there was the World Trade Center bombing in ’93, but I don't think many people remembered that. It just wasn't part of it... It hadn’t bubbled up to our consciousness.

Interesting. So you and the kids your age were in a unique situation where you grew up in a pre-9/11 world, but then you also grew up in a post-9/11 world. So can you talk to us about the shift? From life before 9/11, and after, some of the major changes you noticed?

I mean heightened security everywhere was the most obvious thing. Like, I don't remember what it was like to fly on a plane before 9/11. But I do remember, you know, running into the TSA officers after 9/11, and that felt crazy seeing all the security at airports. I think there was generally a higher degree of police presence around the city just walking around. You could see more cops. But I was too young for that to really make a huge difference. To be honest, my world was pretty limited. Because I had... My mom was kind of a helicopter mom. She was very protective, so I didn't really range that widely in the city until like late high school. So I mean, I wouldn't be able to tell you if the city was so different before 9/11 because I wasn't really going around that much. I was going around with my parents, but that's not the same. So I don't know. I guess honestly, the biggest thing that changed was just the media — the media became a different animal. And you know, the media that I was sort of receiving second-hand because it was always on — MSNBC, CNN, was always on my dad's TV. So just the tenor of things became so much more intense after 9/11 and years after 9/11.

And at the time, did you feel any of it was an overreaction, an underreaction... how did you feel about the changes, or do you think it was just pretty natural?

I mean, it seemed like being on high alert and feeling a little bit more vulnerable and less complacent was a natural reaction to 9/11, you know? It really was a shocking and destabilizing event. And so for things to feel different in general, I think would have been justified. What ended up shaping my thinking about all this is a course I took in college. It was a cinema studies course, called Cinema After 9/11. And that was amazing. It was with this old film critic at The Village Voice, who was just adjunct in so he taught a college class while being a professional film critic, and so he had a really nuanced understanding of all of the stuff that had come out in recent history and, you know, since 2001. He showed us not just the movies that you would expect, like, United 93 and World Trade Center — you know, movies obviously about 9/11 — but how you'll also see all of the Iraq war movies and a kind of violence in cinema that's more hysterical and more of an ordeal to sit through than you had seen in movies before 9/11. And he really tried to sell that thesis, that movies changed both in their themes and their subject matter but also the experience of watching them after 9/11. And that made sense to me, the idea that pop culture changed too — because that did happen.

What do you mean by...you mentioned violence?

Well, he did this thing where he would show us multiple movies at the same time. It was really weird. So you have three TVs in front of us. And in one movie was United 93. Another movie was The Passion of the Christ. And yet another movie — I don't remember what the third one was — but basically, he was trying to make the argument that since 9/11, there had arisen a kind of movie called “the ordeal” — basically movies that are kind of devoted to giving you an extended experience of like visceral discomfort. And that this was kind of like, a uniquely post-9/11 phenomenon, due to the way that we had all been sort of traumatized and the way that we had lived through an ordeal ourselves, like as a collective culture. And you know, I don't know how much this thesis holds water, but it was interesting to see how many movies he showed us that were unpleasant and kind of uncomfortable and, like, riveting in that way.

So was it that people felt that everyone was desensitized, sort of? Is that why movies were able to go beyond what they had before?

Yeah, yeah.

Interesting. Going back, you mentioned how the media changed. Can you talk about some things that stuck out to you about how the media changed?

Yeah, I mean, I guess you know, there had been 24-hour cable news before 9/11. But after 9/11 — like 9/11 was the real test of 24-hour news, in a sense, because it was what everyone was glued to during that whole ordeal — and after that, it just became kind of a fixture in our house, and it was more intense than it had been before. Obviously, a lot was going on, but like the level of nationalistic sentiment was also pretty, pretty intense, as well, like all of the stuff that was filtering out of the Bush White House — you know, “you're either with us or against us,” the “axis of evil”... there was “axis of evil” talk all the time. And the idea that we were continually under attack, we had enemies, you know, we had these enemies on the other side of the world that wanted to destroy us. All of that rhetoric was kind of omnipresent.

So growing up in a private school in New York, I'm assuming it was a pretty liberal area, like the whole dynamic. So did you feel it was more unified across political lines?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think so. And that's why I think my cookie analogy got so much play and praise at my school because my teacher was liberal. My teacher was... I mean, I actually don't know for sure. I don't remember her politics, but I am assuming that she was pretty liberal... if you're, if you're going to be a social studies teacher in the Upper West Side, I think you're probably liberal. So, you know, for the idea that I said in class to get so much praise at that school... I mean, we were all kind of unified in like, pro-America, anti-Middle East and they-hate-us-for-our-freedom sentiment, that kind of jingoism.

And have you ever seen any other time like that in terms of how unified the country was?

Yeah, how about now? I mean, look, we have people of my political persuasion who think Trump is absolutely atrocious right now in how he's handling the coronavirus situation. However, look at the way that he's trying to get through some, frankly, Democratic ideas, like cutting every American a check and expanding the social safety net and getting people paid sick leave and stuff like that. I mean, a crisis does unify people along political lines, even though it also is the test of leadership that shows how our polarized political system right now is so obviously dysfunctional.

So in this time, with a catastrophe looming, or rather one that is already underway, have you been thinking about 9/11 at all, like any of the connections?

To be honest, the last event that felt to me like 9/11 was Trump's election. And it's honestly a disservice to 9/11. . . . You know, Trump's election wasn't the same as 9/11 at all. But in terms of purely the feeling that we were, as a community going through — like a sudden surprising and completely unprecedented national shock — it felt like that. This [coronavirus situation] is different. This is like... I've never lived through anything like this, in terms of the lockdowns and everyone being quarantined and the slow drip of news just getting worse and worse and worse. I mean, this is different.

Yeah, we're interviewing someone else who was in the city on 9/11, and he still lives there now. And he mentioned in an email that what's happening now is the closest he's seen in terms of fear and anxiety throughout the city since 9/11.

Yeah, I could see that. I wouldn't want to be in New York right now. And honestly my heart goes out to New Yorkers right now because it's everything that you're feeling now but times a million, because you're crammed like a sardine into this much smaller space.

How do you feel 9/11 shaped you, just generally? Any specific things that stick out to you now, or that resonated with you that make up who you are as a person?

Well, I would like to say that it shaped me more. Because I think that if you live through something like that, it should do a number of things. First of all, it should remind you that you're not an isolated individual, you live in a community of interdependent and interconnected people. It should also teach you not to take anything for granted in terms of your own safety, but also the stability of your social environment, basically.

You know, it should also teach you to be more alert, but the fact is, it's been almost two decades since 9/11. And as I'm seeing now, my instincts for all of those things... like that's, that's what's scary, that you go through — you live through one crisis and you think that it's going to change you forever, but in my experience, and maybe this is just a function of my own privilege, but like this crisis... I don't feel like I'm using my 9/11 muscles, you know? Like I don't feel like I lived through something and now I'm prepared for this. Now I feel like I've become fat and lazy and stupid about this kind of thing when I should be stronger. And so, in a way I kind of wish it had changed me in a more profound way.